What secret attraction draws one in his summer walk to touch at all the springs on his route, and to pause a moment at each, as if what he was in quest of would be likely to turn up there? I can seldom pass a spring without doing homage to it. It is the shrine at which I oftenest worship. If I find one fouled with leaves or trodden full by cattle, I take as much pleasure in cleaning it out as a devotee in setting up the broken image of his saint. Though I chance not to want to drink there, I like to behold a clear fountain, and I may want to drink next time I pass, or some traveler, or heifer, or milch cow may. Leaves have a strange fatality for the spring. They come from afar to get into it. In a grove or in the woods they drift into it and cover it up like snow. Late in November, in clearing one out, I brought forth a frog from his hibernacle in the leaves at the bottom. He was very black, and he rushed about in a bewildered manner like one suddenly aroused from his sleep.
There is no place more suitable for statuary than about a spring or fountain, especially in parks or improved fields. Here one seems to expect to see figures and bending forms. "Where a spring rises or a river flows," says Seneca, "there should we build altars and offer sacrifices."
I have spoken of the hunter's spring. The traveler's spring is a little cup or saucer shaped fountain set in the bank by the roadside. The harvester's spring is beneath a widespreading tree in the fields. The lover's spring is down a lane under a hill. There is a good screen of rocks and bushes. The hermit's spring is on the margin of a lake in the woods. The fisherman's spring is by the river. The miner finds his spring in the bowels of the mountain. The soldier's spring is wherever he can fill his canteen. The spring where schoolboys go to fill the pail is a long way up or down a hill, and has just been roiled by a frog or muskrat, and the boys have to wait till it settles. There is yet the milkman's spring that never dries, the water of which is milky and opaque. Sometimes it flows out of a chalk cliff. This last is a hard spring: all the others are soft.
There is another side to this subject,— the marvelous, not to say the miraculous; and if I were to advert to all the curious or infernal springs that are described by travelers or others,—the sulphur springs, the mud springs, the sour springs, the soap springs, the soda springs, the blowing springs, the spouting springs, the boiling springs not one mile from Tophet, the springs that rise and fall with the tide; the spring spoken of by Vitruvius, that gave unwonted loudness to the voice; the spring that Plutarch tells about, that had something of the flavor of wine, because it was supposed that Bacchus had been washed in it immediately after his birth; the spring that Herodotus describes,— wise man and credulous boy that he was,—called the "Fountain of the Sun," which was warm at dawn, cold at noon, and hot at midnight; the springs at San Filippo, Italy, that have built up a calcareous wall over a mile long and several hundred feet thick; the renowned springs of Cashmere, that are believed by the people to be the source of the comeliness of their women,—if I were to follow up my subject in this direction, I say, it would lead me into deeper and more troubled waters than I am in quest of at present.
Pliny, in a letter to one of his friends, gives the following account of a spring that flowed near his Laurentine villa:—
"There is a spring which rises in a neighboring mountain, and running among the rocks is received into a little banqueting-room, artificially formed for that purpose, from whence, after being detained a short time, it falls into the Larian Lake. The nature of this spring is extremely curious: it ebbs and flows regularly three times a day. The increase and decrease are plainly visible, and exceedingly interesting to observe. You sit down by the side of the fountain, and while you are taking a repast and drinking its water, which is exceedingly cool, you see it gradually rise and fall. If you place a ring or anything else at the bottom when it is dry, the water creeps gradually up, first gently washing, finally covering it entirely, and then, little by little, subsides again. If you wait long enough, you may see it thus alternately advance and recede three successive times."
Pliny suggests four or five explanations of this phenomenon, but is probably wide of the mark in all but the fourth one:—
"Or is there rather a certain reservoir that contains these waters in the bowels of the earth, and, while it is recruiting its discharges, the stream in consequence flows more slowly and in less quantity, but, when it has collected its due measure, runs on again in its usual strength and fullness."
There are several of these intermitting springs in different parts of the world, and they are perhaps all to be explained on the principle of the siphon.
In the Idyls of Theocritus there are frequent allusions to springs. It was at a spring—and a mountain spring at that—that Castor and Pollux encountered the plug-ugly Amycus:—